I realized that I forgot to remove the jumper to enable SATA2. That helped a little bit, as it brought the burst up about 50MB/s and the overall reads up about 6MB/s.

Now, obviously I won't be using the JMicron or the Silicon Image controllers if I go to Raid three of these drives, as none of them support more than two drives. My only option is the ICH7R or an add-in card.

SMART, SMTP, Staggered spin-up and a few others are just a few of those things that could be really useful that you don't get with built-in controllers.

I looked at my funds, and I would need to sell all three Raptors to buy the card and two more Seagates, and that only gets me a raid 0 or 5 array. I would prefer a raid 0 array for the OS & games, and a raid 1 array for important data, pics, music, etc.

I suppose, though it's not that difficult, usually they transfer over with no problem between onboard intel controllers

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But if you don't go from one Intel solution to another, you're screwed. I went from a SiL 2112 to an NF 4 and almost lost everything. Thanks the powers that be for Raid Reconstructor and Get Data Back.

If it gave you better performance I think it would. I think that's why you have 3 x 320 GB drives in raid 0, instead of two drives in raid 0 or just a single drive. Same reason why you have a quad core instead of a dual core.

I have 3 drives mainly because I was able to get good deals on the 320s and I assumed I'd need the space which I'm finding probably won't be so haha
and I got the quad for a few reasons, performance, folding, and OCing

No, you wouldn't even consider an on-board video solution because you want something that provides real performance. Same thing.

And if you only are using the three drives because you thought you'd need the space, why aren't you running them in JBOD? Simple, because Raid 0 performs much better. I'm not bashing you, but just trying to remind you that this is what we're all about here - performance. There are guys out there that swear by and live only by add-in boards, because they know the difference.

I guess it's all personal preference,
regarding VGA, that's a completely different story and I should've stated that comment better before haha
as for the controller, all I'm saying is I wanted space and performance, my motherboard already has a decently performing RAID controller and I don't have to pay any more for what I believe would be a relatively negligible increase in performance
for those of you that also want it for the ease of transfer in addition to the other benefits I say more power to you if you have the money to spare
Personally I would rather put that $100+ into something such as video card, memory, cpu etc

But take a look at it this way. Say your three drives each give 66 MB/s reads, combined for a total of 200 MB/s. What if an add-in board gave you 10-20MB/s more per drive? So instead of 200 MB/s, you were getting 230-260 MB/s - would that make it worth more to you? Granted, I saw a huge difference when going from one drive to two in Raid 0, and as you go up the performance increase gets lower. But since the hard drive is the slowest component of a modern PC, any improvement you can make in the data transfer would be worthwhile, at least IMHO. Of course, I'd spend $300-500 on a decent solution, maybe more, if I had the money.

The Intel ICHR7 has more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at. It will not be the bottleneck. It may be a limiting factor in other ways that you may or may not notice, like minimal CPU useage, or ability to create advanced RAID arrays.

I believe we need additional benchmarks for disk performance. Such as application load time. Something independant of other hardware used, something consistant. We have too many variables with this test.

A fresh restart and a video of a steam load.
A video of a few game level loads.
A video of a few applications loads.
A video of a file move.

that doesn't make sense...refer to my 3x 320 7200.10s in RAID0 on page 7...

Click to expand...

Yes I see....much lower it looks like. Maybe its time for a defrag or rebuild the array?

As I said, Im running a Matrix Dual Array 0/5 with volume write-back caching enabled so maybe that is a factor. I have 4 drives to your 3, but that part should only be a very small difference......
EDIT: 64k stripe to your 32k too.
EDIT #2: HDtach DOES certainly work in Vista. You just need to run it as an administrator. Perhaps this one you need to disable driver signing as well I cannot remember as I always disable driver signing when I reboot.

Great stuff. Worth looking at. Basically, you need 4HDs and you put 2 arrays across the 4 drives, instead of 2 in 1 array, and 2 in another.
EDIT: I think I mispoke here. You need 4 HD to do a 0/5, but you can do a 0/1 with only 2HDs.

This gives you the benefit of using the fastest part of each HD for your RAID 0, making your RAID 0 more efficient and quicker. Then the rest you use for your storage (RAID 1, 5, whatever) and it doesnt really matter if its all the slower parts because.....well its just storage.

Check out the link, and there is plenty of other stuff on the net regarding Matrix RAID stuff too. Damn good read here too.